Law Practice Roundtable:
Professional Development

Building Talent for a More Successful Firm

The legal profession is undergoing significant change both in
how it serves its clients and how it develops talent, with clients
demanding more and willing to pay less—especially when it
comes to training new lawyers. Dropping the ball on professional
development today can be a mission-critical failure. So what are
firms to do?

In this roundtable, five of the smartest minds in professional development share their
insights on what your firm can do to maximize the results of its professional development
efforts.

Their responsibilities range from a pure focus on education on through to all
facets of talent management, including recruiting, orientation and training, mentoring,
career development, competencies and beyond.

Here are the highlights of what we heard.

Moderated by Karen MacKay, MBA, CHIC and a Law Practice Editorial
Board member.

ParticipantsSusan Clarke is National Director
of Professional Development at
Gowlings, a Canadian firm with 700
lawyers, eight offices across Canada,
one in Moscow and one in London, UK.

Sari Fried-Fiori is Chief Professional
Development Officer at Fulbright &
Jaworski L.L.P., a full-service international
firm with nearly 900 lawyers
working in 16 offices. She is based in
Houston and is the Past Chair of the
Professional Development Consortium.

Susan Hayes, based in Halifax, Nova
Scotia, is the Professional Resources
& Development Officer at Stewart
McKelvey, a regional firm in Atlantic
Canada with approximately 220 lawyers
in six offices across four provinces.

Richard Pearson is Director of
Professional Development at
Davis Wright Tremaine in Seattle.
DWT is a West Coast-based
full-service firm with 550 lawyers
in nine offices, eight in the U.S.
and one in Shanghai, China.

Scott Westfahl is Director of Professional
Development at Goodwin
Procter LLP in Washington, DC.
Goodwin Procter has approximately
850 lawyers in 10 offices. He is
the current Chair of the Professional
Development Consortium.

Karen MacKay (KM), MODERATOR: Where does professional development
fit within the strategic agenda? Or,
as firms look to the next three to
five years, where should it fit?

Susan Clarke (SC): I think professional
development will be high up on the
strategic agenda going forward. Law
firms today realize that improving their
intellectual capital calls for a systematic
approach. On-the-job training has
its effectiveness, but we cannot solely
rely on senior partners to train associates
because the partners themselves
are closing deals in days instead of
months and they simply cannot take
the time. So firms need to provide
practical and focused training for their
young lawyers. I think there’s a wealth of appreciation among firms for professional
development, in part to take
the burden off the partners’ shoulders.
Although, ultimately, I think management
committees do acknowledge that
accountability rests with them to make
sure something worthwhile is done in
the area of professional development.

Sari Fried-Fiori (SFF): The way that
PD fits in the strategic agenda continues
to evolve. The competitive
landscape is really driving law firms
to run more like businesses—to
bring greater value, improve client
service and stand out. The way that
professional development connects
is by looking at how to bring the best
talent to the needs of the client.
A law firm is about two things: its
clients and its people. Correspondingly,
it is incumbent on the firm and
its leaders to develop its talent to ensure
that the firm has a ready, responsive,
capable group of professionals
to meet clients’ needs. So the better
we are at developing talent to meet
the needs of our clients, the higher
PD will be on the strategic agenda.

Susan Hayes (SH): I’d like to build
on Sari’s comments. The real focus
here is client service. Clients are both
tightening their belts and heightening
their expectations about what they’re
going to get from their law firms. This
presents an opportunity to implement
some real change in how we provide
legal services. Beyond the substantive
programs, we need to get closer to the strategic goals of the firm and
its clients and expand to meet that
focus, which includes staying ahead
of the curve to deal with the needs
people may not have thought of yet.

Richard Pearson (RP): As Sari and
Susan said, it is all about clients and
people. We can make a big impact by
connecting PD to the strategic goals
of the firm, although ultimately firm
leadership needs to be accountable
for developing and implementing
strategy—that cannot be delegated.
New skills are needed to profitably
execute on things like alternative billing
and project management, for
example. Also, retention will become
important again as firms emerge from
the latest downturn—this time it
will be about retaining the right talent.
Leadership is critical and PD has
a key role to play in developing the
leadership within the firm as well.

“Too
often we’re caught in this false trade-off thinking that people development and talent
management stuff is ‘soft stuff’ but we need to go out and serve clients. That completely
misses the point that we won’t serve those clients well if we’re not developing the right
kind of lawyers.”
—Scott Westfahl

Scott Westfahl (SW): Building on the
points about competition, not only
for talent but also for work, the research
and the reality are showing us
that the demand for legal services isn’t
likely to grow any time soon, which
means there’s going to be greater
competition. In terms of the strategic
agenda, PD brings the ability to help
figure out how to serve clients more
efficiently and compete for legal services
work more effectively. We need
to be figuring out different kinds of
staffing models, different kinds of
advancement models and different
kinds of client service delivery models.
Underneath all of that, we have
to drive cultural change. There are
so many ways that those in PD can
plant seeds and affect cultural change,
in particular, as Richard noted, in
focusing on leadership development.
I think it’s a very exciting time.

KM: Many Law Practice readers
are in firms a lot smaller than the
ones represented at this table.
How do smaller firms without
dedicated PD professionals provide
the resources necessary in the
competition for talent and clients?

SFF: The challenge for all law firms
today, irrespective of their size, is that
clients don’t want to pay for the development
of lawyers—they want law
firms to take that on. As part of meeting
that challenge, I think smaller firms
are able to do more one-on-one and
on-the-job development because of
how they are structured. Even in larger
firms that have the resources to focus
on developing lawyers through formalized
training programs, learning on
the job still remains one of the primary
approaches to developing lawyers.

SH: While my firm does have a dedicated
professional development team,
we are a smaller firm than the others
on the panel. And I agree that smaller
firms do have the advantage of being
more flexible in their ability to offer
one-on-one development—including
that partners can take younger associates
along to client meetings or the
courtroom and provide “at-the-elbow”
training without some of the pressures
that come with being in a bigger firm.

RP: Smaller firms really need to dedicate
a partner to the development of
others, someone who’s genuinely interested
and committed to it. Under this
person’s leadership, the firm should
start at the top and train its leaders in
group process, learning, mentoring
and coaching. There are many useful
online tools the firm can leverage for
the delivery of information. In addition,
every lawyer should have an individual
practice development plan—this is as true for solo practitioners as for those
in the AmLaw 100. Smaller firms can
also make profitable use of outside consultants
and coaches to support the development
of their lawyers—especially
in things like business development
and how to leverage their practices.

"Law firms today realize that improving
their intellectual capital calls for a systematic approach.
On-the-job training has its effectiveness,
but we cannot solely rely on senior
partners to train associates.”
—Susan Clarke

SC: Smaller firms can take advantage of
online resources, although some online
materials are of much better quality
than others, so they have to be smart
about what they use. Local and national
bar associations, law societies across
Canada, and a few law schools are
starting to provide webinars, regional
programs and archived videos with
content that is often specifically focused
on small firms and solo practitioners,
so those are good resources to tap.

SW: Something not to be missed by
smaller firms is that there are a growing
number of very talented large
law firm PD people who’ve gone off
and started consulting practices. This
means a smaller firm could get a piece
of somebody who’s got terrific experience
on a retainer or a per-project
basis, which is a cost-effective way to
get high-quality programming without
having a dedicated PD person on staff.

I also agree with Richard that smaller
firms really need one or two partners
who are real believers and champions.
Perhaps the best model I’ve seen
is where it’s a partner who’s nearing
retirement and has been a really good
developer, mentor and teacher of associates
along the way. And because
they’ve been contributors to the firm
for so long, older partners have a lot
of credibility and clout and can influence
direction with regard to talent.

KM: In firms large and small, a lot
of money gets spent on professional
development in the early years
only to walk out the door. As I once
heard Karen Stacey, former PD
director at Arnold & Porter, say,
“Better to train them and have them
leave than not to train them and
have them stay.” So how do you
measure progress in what you’re
achieving in your training efforts?

RP: If the firm aligns its PD efforts to
its strategy, measurement can occur at
the macro level in terms of progress
toward the strategic goals. On a more
granular level, attainment of individual
professional and business development
goals can easily be measured—360-
degree evaluations are useful tools
and, of course, retention of the people
you want to keep is a key measure.

SC: The obvious, easy thing to do is to
look for signs of development through
the evaluation process. Retention statistics
over a period of time are also a measure.
But measurement is not a perfect
science by any means. In fact, a partner
asked me the other day how we measure
the impact of business development
coaching and its impact on billings. While
we measure matter involvement, responsibility
and origination, it is very difficult
to measure the direct impact of coaching
or other kinds of behavioral development.

“With talent being a law firm’s primary asset,
how talent is managed and developed needs
to be fully integrated into how firms operate
and how they deliver service to clients.”
—Sari Fried-Fiori

SFF: Susan uses a great example with
regard to business development. It can
be challenging to parse out whether billings
increased directly as a function of
coaching or whether they increased due
to other factors. Those who are purists
about ROI will always push back and say
you can’t parse out the direct impact of
PD at that level of detail. That said, we are
being asked more and more by those who
lead our firms to show a financial return
on the PD investment and its impact on
the business. To do that, we can measure
a number of things such as retention and
utilization as well as evaluate programs,
particularly in terms of usefulness and
applicability. Although there is a lot of
emphasis on ROI, simple statistics can be
very powerful in helping understand the
value of PD, too. Subjective measures of
improved work quality resulting from PD
efforts are also important. For example,
you can measure whether someone is
more effective at formulating persuasive
written arguments in their draft briefs
following an advocacy writing program.

SW: We’ve built a kind of satisfaction
survey into our associates’ annual selfassessment
report that gives us some
really good data on whether we are meeting
associates’ expectations. One of our
big goals is to reduce the delta between
what people experience and what we
actually want them to experience—the
theory versus the practice, so to speak.
The surveys help to identify the gaps
and measure our progress toward filling
those gaps. We also have a good process
for collecting data on how effective our
programs are at the time of delivery, via
reports back from training sessions.

Finally, I believe a measure of our
progress in PD is if we are keeping pace
with other firms—are we falling behind
or are we actually ahead of our competitors?
Are we pushing the envelope
on thinking and bringing new ideas? I
think if you’re constantly playing catchup
and focused solely on implementation,
you’re not going to have much of
an impact and you’ll be in trouble.

KM: Can you describe anything that is
being done in your firms or other firms
that is showing enormous promise?

SH: In our firm, we have customized our
Learning Management System (LMS) to
create a desktop-accessible knowledge
center. The LMS went from a tracking
tool to a dashboard that is an entry
point to knowledge and just-in-time
learning, podcasts and training materials.
Beyond that it provides a history
of the lawyers’ training and development
with the firm, which gives a pretty
powerful snapshot of the investment
the firm has made in each individual. It
has created a lot of very positive buzz.

SW: I’m excited about the big movement
firms are making away from the
lock-step model of advancement for
people and the introduction of more
career flexibility for associates based
on solid talent management tools like
competency models and evaluations
that track the competencies lawyers really
need to be effective in their roles.
These kinds of tools allow us to measure
a combination of knowledge, skills and
behavior to provide better feedback.
Nearly six years ago our firm started developing
competencies and putting an
evaluation structure in place, and now,
watching how more firms are moving
toward this new model is to me incredibly
promising because we’ve lost a lot
of very talented lawyers when our business
structures have become too rigid.

SFF: I agree that the competency movement,
which started in 2001 but didn’t
pick up steam until about 2005 in the
United States, has really taken off. This
is evidenced by the number of firms
that have begun to invest in defining
the characteristics of success, and the
behaviors that people need to exhibit
to achieve success as defined by clients,
the firm and the marketplace. Why this
is so enormously promising is that it
provides the substance to integrate all
the facets of how you develop a ready,
talented, capable workforce. It allows us
to recruit lawyers, develop them, assess
them, retain them or help them land in
a place that is a better fit for them. It especially
enables firms to more efficiently focus on developing the knowledge
and skills needed by our clients.

RP: The development of competencies
definitely allows a more strategic integrated
approach to talent management
and development. We have initiated individual
career development planning,
which is allowing us to focus our investments
much more directly on the needs
of the lawyers and build ownership in
their ongoing development. In support
of these efforts, interactive webinars,
one-on-one coaching and group mentoring
are all showing great promise.

KM: Many firms may not be as
far along as your firms are. What
mistakes do you see firms making?
What should they avoid?

SW: A mistake some are making right
now is to think that what has happened
to the industry in the last year and a
half is just a blip and everything will go
back to being the way it was before the
economic crisis. I don’t believe that is
true, and most of the experts who are
studying the legal profession from the
outside, economists and social scientists,
are showing how the market for
talent and the market for legal services
are both changing rather substantially.

SFF: One of the challenges—and I think
it kind of cuts both ways—is whether
we underestimate or overestimate the
amount of change that needs to be
made in order for law firms to continue
to grow, be successful and meet their
clients’ needs. Best practices in this area
are to engage people early on in change,
to talk with people, to get input along
the way, and to be as responsive as you
can to most of the input, while knowing
that you can’t meet all the needs.

“We need to get closer to the strategic
goals of the firm and its clients and
expand to meet that focus, which
includes staying ahead of the curve.”
—Susan Hayes

SH: I’ve seen firms get too focused on
associate training in isolation from the
client experience. I’d say the mistake
there has been trying to be all things
to each and every associate rather than
remembering where all of this should
be driven from, which is the client experience.
PD initiatives should always
tie back to the firm’s strategic goals.

SC: I think one of the mistakes that large
firms make is to assume that every corner
needs the same kind of professional
development. It is very easy to believe
your main location sets the agenda and
just ships things out by videoconference.
But not all content will be relevant
and well received across the board, and
I think that can cause some disconnect.
My firm has generated a good response
by paying a lot of attention to the varying
needs of our different locations.

RP: It’s “ad hockery”—by which I
mean not thinking strategically, not
linking talent to strategy, and indulging
in what Terri Mottershead calls
“random acts of training.” Ultimately,
a lack of systems thinking and innovation
creates the opportunity for
mistakes to be made. This is like having
the heat on and the windows open.

KM: New delivery mechanisms are
changing access to professional
development resources. What’s
working, and what isn’t?

SC: Videoconference works for things
like information delivery. However, it
does not work for skills training. We
need a balance between the online life
and the human interaction. One of my
goals is to develop a network throughout
our various offices of replicating
training experiences so that a live
program in one place can be customized
and relevant somewhere else.

SFF: We use a blended approach for
formal training to ensure that our attorneys
get access to the same knowledge.
We use videoconference for the
lecture portions of our training across
offices, and then host local office skillsbased
sessions or discussion groups to
enhance application of the training to
the job. Another delivery mechanism
that I think has promise for law firms
is creating social media communities,
where people can pose questions that
are specific to what they’re working on
and engage in substantive discussions.

“We need to reduce our dependence on
the anachronism of the billable hour…
and realign incentive systems to reward
people development, efficiency and
innovation instead.”
—Richard Pearson

RP: I agree about looking for opportunities
to blend virtual and live learning
experiences. In fact, that is the essence
of our new group mentoring initiative.
E-learning is great for us—people can
access high-quality internal or external
content 24-7 and can even download
it to their iPods. Interactive webinars
are opening a whole new way to engage
people who are geographically diverse— although collaborative learning
technologies are just beginning to appear
in a format that law firms can use.

SW: I agree that the blended approach is
the way to go when you’re at a firm with
multiple offices, and the more you can
replicate live programs in various localities,
the better off you’re going to be.
Technology offers only so much promise
in terms of sharing of knowledge
because a lot of what lawyers do is live
and interactive and the way they learn
is by doing. But I think we’ll be better
off as we begin developing new kinds
of interactive online learning tools.

Social media is something that holds
more immediate promise for the kind of
culture building and information sharing
needed today. Look at how companies
like Deloitte and IBM are applying
social media platforms—with people
profiles that give a rich sense of who
someone is, what they know how to do
personally and professionally, the best
way to connect with that person and
what networks they’re involved in. That
sort of information sharing can be very
rich in terms of building culture and
creating an environment where learning
is more likely to happen because you’re
connecting people, and then people will
take it from there and figure out how
they want to learn from each other.

SH: I’ll add that it’s easier for smaller
firms to be more agile in their delivery
mechanisms. However, I would
echo the comment that—even in
small offices—you see a significant
level of disengagement among videoconference
participants who are not
in the same room with the speaker.
We have a significantly higher attrition
rate from webinars, even if
you’re delivering quality, than from
any other training delivery method.

KM: If you could change one thing
about the practice of law and its
approach to the development of its
professionals, what would that be?

SH: It would be the level of engagement
that partners have in the development
of younger lawyers. As firms
increase the sophistication of their
PD resources, it’s easy for partners to
abdicate responsibility, but as Sari indicated
earlier, it really does take a village
and partners are an integral part.

SC: If you’re opening this up to my
fantasies, I would change the entire
structure. I would really love to see us
create a co-op mentality for the first
three years of practice so that young
lawyers don’t come in with a sense that
they’re supposed to be a fully formed
practicing lawyer on day one, but
instead they are now going to spend
three years learning to practice law.

SFF: My change would be that when a
law firm is making decisions about its
strategy, business or operations, there
would always be someone at the table
who is focused on talent—someone
who is thinking about how decisions
will impact talent and how talent can
be leveraged to help the firm achieve its
goals and consistently meet its clients’
needs. With talent being a law firm’s
primary asset, how talent is managed
and developed needs to be fully integrated
into how firms operate and
how they deliver service to clients.

SW: Outstanding—the logical implication
for what Sari is recommending goes
to the core of the business. Our mission
is to serve clients and develop people,
and that’s a co-equal mission, and that’s
how professional development becomes
part of the strategic discussion. Without
people who are growing and developing
as lawyers, without a continuing focus
on improving the quality of law that’s
practiced, we can’t serve our clients most
effectively. Too often we’re caught in this
false trade-off thinking that the people
development and talent management
stuff is “soft stuff” that’s nice to have,
but we need to go out and serve clients.
It completely misses the point that we
won’t serve those clients well if we’re not
developing the right kind of lawyers.

RP: We talk teamwork and innovation
but in many firms we reward individual
performance and the status quo. We
need to reduce our dependence on the
anachronism of the billable hour, which
is a tremendous disincentive to many
people, and realign incentive systems to
reward people development, efficiency
and innovation instead. By focusing
on delivering great value to clients in a
way that makes sense to them, lawyers
can then focus on developing their
people and systems to be as efficient as
possible. Both clients and their lawyers
win with this approach. This would
also affect firms’ ability to attract and
retain the right people. We need to create
cultures of innovation—that is what
our clients are striving to do on a daily
basis, and we should do the same.

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